Quote Originally Posted by bubbagump
Good work from Audioholics via The Consumerist:

http://consumerist.com/2010/01/compa...ts-caught.html

http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/t...icon-outside-1

Great gotcha journalism from Audioholics. Maybe it will open the door to more thorough investigation from other audio reviewers. And not necessarily the blatant rip-offs. I'm also referring the the insanely subjective reviews found in magazines such as Stereophile.
Good thread....

Though I think you need to keep in mind that not all review mags/sites have the technical expertise as Audioholics...

Stereophile focuses on Subjective and Measurements.... Not opening up chassis's and comparing to other brands...

And they do identify when products are poor value for money based on measurements (and subjective reviews)... For example: In this recent review of the Bel Canto USB Link:

http://www.stereophile.com/budgetcom...er/index1.html

John Atkinson makes this comparison:

Both the M-Audio and E-Mu devices provide the same basic conversion as the Bel Canto, with the added complication of the user having to install a driver program, but at significantly lower cost. When I played music CDs through them and the Benchmark DAC1, I could hear no appreciable differences among the three USB-S/PDIF converters. With the Assemblage DAC-1, the Bel Canto Link gave a sound that was cleaner than the E-Mu's but, to my surprise, was not appreciably different from the cheap M-Audio's, even with high-sample-rate files.
And concludes with this:

Provided it is used with a D/A processor that offers effective jitter rejection, the USB Link 24/96 does what Bel Canto promises it will do, and can be recommended. However, I can't pretend that the $495 USB Link doesn't come under strong competition from M-Audio's $100 Transit USB. Both handle sample rates up to 96kHz, and for a Mac user like me, the potential advantage of the Bel Canto of not having to manually set playback sample rate with Windows is moot. But with its aluminum enclosure, the made-in-America Bel Canto does feel like a high-end product; with the Chinese-made M-Audio, plastic is as plastic does.